Moving Your Blog To A New URL? Tell Google Webmasters Tool About The Change In Address

There may be times when you move to a newer house, in many of those cases you have to spend a whole lot of time updating your postal address for different services you use to make sure that your bills and other correspondence does not go to your old address.

The web acts in a similar way, however on the web the domain name is your home, and in many cases you may decide to move to a new domain name (URL change), for example you were earlier hosted on a WordPress or Blogger blog and decided to get your own domain, or for example you decided to change your domain name altogether.

Just like you move things from your old house to your new house, you also do the same by moving content from your old blog to your new blog, however when it comes to moving your traffic from your old blog to the new one, or updating the URLs (think home address) in search engines you don’t really have much choice except for using 301 (permanent) redirects to tell search engines that you have moved.

Google Webmaster tools with the introduction of Change of address makes the transition between domain names much more easier, the process will still require you to use 301 redirects from your old domain to your new one, however Google will now allow users to specify the URL of your new domain to make the process more smoother than before.

If you are moving from one domain to another, here are some steps you can follow to make the transition smoother, this assumes that you already have a Google Webmaster account, if you don’t have one yet, you can signup for a Google Webmaster account, however you will have to add both your old site and new site to your account if you didn’t have an account earlier.

Step 1: Move all content from your old blog to your new blog (we will be writing tutorials on how to do this soon)

Step 2: Make sure you use 301 redirects to permanently redirect content from your old blog to your new one.

Step 3: Login to your Google Webmaster account and add your new domain to it and verify the new domain.

Step 4: In your Google Webmasters account, manage your old domain and Click on Site configuration Change of address, remember you will be seeing a new interface, Google has now migrated to a newer interface for Webmaster Tools.

Step 5: Make sure you have followed all the instructions listed there, once you are sure, select a new domain name in step 4, that you want to use a the new URL for the older one and hit on submit.

That’s it, this will speed up your move and ease the process of moving from a old domain name to a new domain name on the internet, hope you enjoyed this tip, for more tips like these visit Webmaster Tips.

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Keith Dsouza

I am the editor-in-chief and owner of Techie Buzz. I love coding and have contributed to several open source projects in the past. You can know more about me and my projects by visiting my Personal Website.I am also a social networking enthusiast and can be found active on twitter, you can follow Keith on twitter @keithdsouza. You can click on my name to visit my Google+ profile. View all posts by Keith Dsouza